Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Missionary Email: I Don't Like Emails

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 11:18 PM

So I came to the discovery really fast on my mission that sending weekly emails can be quite a task, so here's the deal, unless people actually start writing me letters every week, I will send a couple sentence email home saying that I am still alive to comply with my mission rules to be exactly obedient and weekly email home, then I will reply to Gigi, or another random email or two that happens to my mailbox every month from someone else. Especially from my parents. You guys are supposed to write me every week. That's a rule they tell you. I don't think it's a lot to ask for either. Because the way I figure it, I am putting effort into thinking and putting together a nice interesting email every week, and it's not fair for me to get online every week to nothing. I'm writing this stuff in my journal, so a lot of this is a repeat of things I've already written, and since I'm sending this email to my parents and my SEVEN siblings. That is 9 people..plus Stuart. So 10. So I expect to hear from you. I've gotten more emails now from Aunt Allison than a lot of you.

I know what a busy life is like, even before my mission I overloaded myself, and I still had time to write Gigi emails, even if I just told her nothing happened and included a random boring story. I should have 9-10 emails every week, since Gen and Stuart when they write usually write in the same email. And mom and dad, I feel as my parents you should be following up with your kids at home to make sure they write me. A word of advice, Gigi usually responds the day after my email arrives, or even the same day, since it is night when I send this there. That will probably help the rest of you respond if you start writing when you get my emails an email in response.

Now, this last week was okay. Today we are going to Taipei to Taipei 101, because my companions trainer wants us to, and she's in Taiwan right now, so that's what we are going to do. It's really interesting because her trainer and her husband are in Taiwan on vacation for a little while, and when we met her trainer last Sunday at stake conference, I found out her companion is married to a Jeff Cook, a boy that was in my ward at BYU-Idaho. He went to Taipei on a mission too, just not Taipei. He was writing to this Sister Brady (Cook) girl back when we were in the same ward together. What a small Mormon world, but I shouldn't be surprised because stuff like that happens all the time.

She's a nice girl though. My trainer is really excited about meeting up with them. And she was excited to see them Sunday too. This last Saturday, we had Xie Wenrui (Daidai)'s baptism. It was really cool. She was so nervous before the baptism, but it was really cool, because she talked after her baptism about how she felt, and she said she was so nervous before, but after she was actually baptized, she felt really comfortable and happy. Her friend and another of our investigators, Lin Yaqing was there, and we had a quick lesson after the baptism with them. We were really confused where to put the number though, because we weren't sure if DaiDai counted as a member yet or not since she hadn't received the Holy Ghost, but I figure not, since they raise their hand to welcome them into the church after they receive the Holy Ghost, or baptism by fire.

It was good though because we asked Yaqing she needed to set a goal for baptism, because originally they wanted to get baptized together, but then Ya3qing1 didn't have a testimony of Joseph Smith yet, and wasn't willing to commit to the Sabbath yet because of her job. And she said she just wasn't as fast as DaiDai, but she was willing to get baptized sometime next month. She's a really great investigator. She asks sincere questions and is really good about reading and praying. She is just progressing slowly though, and that's okay. I know that she's a very dedicated girl, so once she goes through with baptism, she'll be very committed. It's is funny though, because DaiDai's friends all had a dream (like 2 or 3 different people or something) that she died and decided she needed the protection of the Holy Ghost, I can't remember if I already told you that. But yeah, they are SOOO excited for DaiDai to get the gift of the Holy Ghost this Sunday coming. DaiDai just wants to do it because she believes, but all her friends want her to do it because they want her to have the Holy Ghost's protection.

Our next baptism goal is a week from Saturday with a Wang Zixia. She's the one we met at the church because a member saw her looking at it and invited her in. She's really great. She made that baptism goal at her first lesson. And she's been really good about remembering it. She mentions it every time we meet. We've had to start meeting with her twice a week to prepare her for it. She's really going to have to keep her commitments to gain a testimony of Joseph Smith and everything else we are teaching her. She has a lot of questions, she was really surprised at first to find out that we believed in a Pre-mortal life and the spirit world and everything. But she's really great. She keeps her commitments to read and she comes to church every week. She's from mainland China and her husband is really possessive of her though, so I hope she makes some friends in the ward and stuff soon. She can understand the language, and a lot of characters, but it's different here in Taiwan.

The accent is different and the characters are harder to read. Since we use traditional here instead of simplified. We have another investigator though Wei Yan who is also from China. She has lived her for 7 years. She had us have Wang Zixia call her before we started the lesson. They set up to play together sometime.

They have a lot of similarities. They are both from Mainland, and they have husbands who are Buddist and Taiwanese. However, Wei Yan's husband don't let her be baptized yet, she comes to church every week, but works with her husband and they let her come to church, but she has to break the Sabbath a lot because she can't have Sunday off, and they refuse to let her get baptized, I think because they don't want her to pay tithing. So I think Wang Zixia's husband is a little better because she doesn't work like Wei Yan, so he just lets her worship how she wants. He's not opposed to her religion. He just wants to know where she is when she leaves the house, and wants her to schedule her appointments with us when he isn't home. So I have a feeling they will both be really good friends.

Right now besides who I have already talked about, we have one more lady with a baptism goal. Her name is Zhu Di. Or in English, Judy. Haha. She's really great. She was found by our zone leaders E. Rice and Huang. They are really excellent missionaries. They are always giving us really great investigators. They have a whole lot of faith. They met her in the park when E. Rice's tire popped, then after we set-up with her, before our appointment, E. Rice had another tire pop, and he ran into Judy again. So he told us before we ever met with her that she is really special. And she is.

She told him that she had been meeting with Jehovah's Witness missionaries, but felt like something was missing. She's already really great about reading the Book of Mormon,E. Rice had given her one, and she had already read the introductions to the BOM before we had our appointment. She's willing to be baptized and everything. The only set back is that she is without a job, and so she has been moving from place to place living with other people. I'm really hoping she can find a job. She said the Jehovah's Witness missionaries gave her food and clothes. So she is really grateful to them. I'm sure as she keeps her commitments and comes to church and starts to learn and keep the commandments, she will be blessed. She's read the Bible 5 times, so everything we teach her clicks really fast in her head. It's really great because usually since we mostly teach non-Christian's, you have to take it very slow and simple. But Judy get's things really fast. I'm excited to keep working with her.

We have a lot of excellent investigators besides that, in fact, these last couple weeks we've had appointment after appointment. Our time is not empty. On Monday we had president interviews, then immediately after had 3 appointments every hour. 4, 5, 6. Then we rushed over to Neili to do FHE with a part member family. It was crazy. And so was yesterday, we had appointments all day. We actually ate dinner with a lady who we met that day. She was so excited she insisted we come back to eat with her after the appointment we were headed to, so we did. Neili is a great area! We've found 3 new investigators there in the last week and a half.

It's great to be busy. It means the work in Zhongli is going really well.